Monday, October 22, 2007

We're in Montreal for a long weekend. Montreal is a lovely mix ofEuropean and North American city life, full of cafes, ethnicrestaurants, mixed languages, and wanderlust-inspiring parks. Okay,more European than North American (though we could get the American League Baseball Championships on tv to see how the Red Sox/Indians series wound up). We get up here every few years andalways have a great time. However, there is one aspect of Montrealwhich gets me every time: French (the language).

I'm generally adept at languages. Tourist-level language comesquickly and easily, and I tend to remember basic phrases for a longtime. French, however, has a bizarre opposite effect. I can't recallbasic French phrases. Even worse, when someone speaks French to me, Ilose the ability to speak at all, even in English! This happens allthe time: some addresses me in French and my mind goes totally blank.Waitstaff will say something (to clarify my badly slaughtered attemptto order) and I'll just stare at them trying to figure out how to talkagain. Shriram has seen this often enough to believe me, and we areslowly learning that letting him order for us both spares much familyembarrassment.

From a scientific perspective, I find this fascinating though.Experience has led me to believe that I have a default "stammering"language: when in a foreign language situation, my brain defaults tothe current "stammering" language. For a long time, that language wasChinsese (which I majored in as an undergrad). That's been replacedby German due to my many conferences there over the years. How is itthen that one language (and only that one language so far) causes meto lose language ability entirely? Surely there's an interestingexplanation for this -- pointers to any relevant theories?

Fortunately, the language of cycling is nonverbal, so I've been ableto get around quite handily on two wheels this weekend. Montreal isoften hailed as a great city for bicycling. Last time we were here,we brought our bikes and rode the Lacine canal route, which runs alongthe St. Lawrence River. Or so we hear. The day we did the ride wasso foggy that we never saw the water, even though we rode alongsideit, over it, and around it for several hours. Still, the bikinginfrastructure seemed good enough that we brought the bikes again forthis trip. We spent yesterday on and around Mt Royal, the mainvantage point over the city.

Today, I ventured along the lines marked as some sort of bicycle routeon the tourist map. Biking lanes here are fairly sophisticated. Thebiking lanes run between the sidewalk and parking on the side of theroad, sometimes separated from the cars by short concrete walls.Biking routes are well-marked, and clear marking indicate when bikinglanes will cross one another. I usually don't like city riding, butthe lanes here are quite enjoyable.

A short spin in the bike lanes highlights, however, that cars andbikes follow two different road protocols. Cars behave as carsusually do: traffic lights, signaled turns, and the usual degree ofcity aggression. Cyclists, in contrast, follow Indian road culture(as I described in my earlier Indian travelogue): traffic lights aresuggestions at best, and plowing through perpendicular-moving trafficis par for the course. Even as a pedestrian, I've felt more at riskfrom the cyclists than from the taxi drivers (which I'd heard warningsabout on local cycling pages). The craziest cyclists are invariablyriding helmetless (as are most cyclists here). Casual observationsuggests that helmet wearers are much more likely to be men thanwomen, and spandex seems reserved for touring cyclists rather thanweekday riders. Quite a change from home, where most cyclists areexercising rather than commuting and seem aware that they areviolating car-based road protocols, rather than asserting a vehicularcounterculture.

Vegetarian visitors should check out Cafe Lola Rosa, on Milton streetnear McGill. We had two delightful meals at this little veggie cafeon this trip, as well as a fine Tibetian meal at Shambala onSt. Denis. Montreal is very veggie friendly, though with lesselegance than veggie restaurants in France. Dishes here are bothNorth-American- and French-inspired, but generally fairly light yetfilling. Attempts to locate fine croissant on this trip didn't workout too well, but that gives a goal for the next time we make it upthis way.

Wednesday, October 17, 2007

While paying a stack of bills this morning, I noticed a new online payment option for one of our annual bills. With all the sabbatical travel we did last year, online bill pay and tracking was a lifesaver: I put monthly reminders into my calendar to login and pay our credit cards, billed the utilities directly, and didn't worry at all about missing payments while on the road. I had the checkbook in hand to pay today's annual bill the old-fashioned way, but decided to check out the ebilling option.

To my surprise, I paid the bill the old-fashioned way anyway. Signing up for ebilling meant another account and another password, and I have spent far too much time this week trying to remember various usernames and passwords for rarely-accessed sites. The website design rendered poorly on firefox, so the instructions were hard to read. Worst of all, the signup page stated that once you signed up for ebilling, you would no longer receive paper statements. You could get paper statements again at any time by calling customer service, who would then unenroll you from electronic bill paying. In other words, it appears that you can only pay your bill online if you agree to stop receiving paper statements.

The loss of a paper bill was the final straw for me. For annual bills, a piece of paper on my desk to remind me to make a payment is essential. Monthly bills are routine enough that my mental cycle checks in if I haven't issued a payment recently, but annual bills are hopeless. The volume of email I get mandates the use of email filters, and I sometimes ignore the non-essential filters for days or weeks at a stretch. At core, I simply don't trust my personal information management setup--ie, the combination of my calendar and email--to remind me about critical issues that only happen once a year. Out of sight, out of mind feels like a very real danger where annual bills are concerned. Something is clearly not working quite right when we choose not to use tools that supposedly save time and memory out of a fear that we might not remind ourselves to use them.